Introducing Ethics into Startup Workplaces

by Jing Chen, Kevin Lau, Vashisht Madhavan, Jenny Pullman

Original Proposal 

Note: We kept the essence of our original project proposal the same, but revised certain aspects. We added a more thorough description of our motivations, and added more information about the results we collected and feedback from Skydeck and its constituent companies. We also included some future plans we talked about during our presentation, and some improvements we came up with and that were suggested by peers and our GSI.

Our project proposal was largely fueled by our group’s individual interviews with employees of small companies around the Bay Area. Each member of the group conducted a short interview on ethics with an engineering professional in fields ranging from computer science to pharmaceutics, and we each asked our interviewees about their experiences regarding ethics in the workplace. Though some of them had ethics issues present in the back of their minds, they largely did not consider ethical issues as an essential part of their career or daily tasks. They struggled to think of examples of ethical problems that could arise in their lives, and found difficulty identifying resources within their company and combat possible ethical issues. When we regrouped and discussed this common aspect among our interviews, we realized that many companies do not take ethics into consideration when launching or even sustaining their businesses. This is problematic for several reasons, particularly because if an issue does crop up, the employee and company will not have an immediate solution. Also, tech companies have a huge amount of power over our everyday products, and if they do not recognize their responsibility and moral values, they could easily negatively impact society. As a result, we feel it is important to bring awareness to companies, particularly startups, and highlight that ethics is an important issue for which they should be providing resources and encouraging discussion among employees.

To make our project more specific, we decided to narrow down our audience to startups, since we would be more likely to have a significant impact on these small companies. In addition, as was discussed in Bernt Wahl’s guest lecture, entrepreneurs often face ethical issues that could make or break their company, and they have the hefty responsibility of establishing the culture and values of their startup, which could vary dramatically depending on the direction that the company’s leader chooses to go. We decided that focusing on startups would be most beneficial for us in learning about ethical issues in the workplace, since they tend to be more responsive, as well as for the companies that we could positively influence. Since resources may be limited, especially for a small company, we decided to implement our project by initiating a discussion on ethics in the form of an interactive letter to companies via Skydeck, the Berkeley startup incubator. Skydeck is easy to access and contact, and since the companies in Skydeck are local, they are more receptive to Cal students.

Our letter via Skydeck doubled as the civic engagement portion of our assignment. We converted the letter to a google form and distributed it among the Skydeck companies. The letter is attached below in the comments (civic engagement completion), but in summary, we introduced ourselves as students in an ethics class concerned with the lack ethics discussion in the engineering workplace. We conducted a general survey on how aware the employees were on ethics in general, and then posed some hypothetical situations as an extra group activity that the employees could choose to partake in. We hope that with this information and their feedback, we will be able to follow up with these companies and possibly reach out to more startups with improved methods of emphasizing the importance of ethics, and inspire the entrepreneurs to consistently take these values into consideration on an everyday basis.

The time to draft the letter and send it out took only a few days, but because the company can decide whether or not to act upon the letter, a response could take any amount of time. Actually answering the questions in the letter and participating in the activity should take no more than an hour, so the entire process does not require a large amount of time. We streamlined the process by making the letter a google form where employees can easily submit their responses. Our aim is really to put the idea of ethics in the table for these startups, since our interviews revealed that many engineering employees rarely think about ethics in relation to their jobs at all. As for cost, there was none.

We recently sent out the form, so we have not yet finished collecting responses. However, we have seen positive results as a whole. Many employees we spoke to showed support for our ethics worksheet/letter, and employees of Skydeck were considering having an ethics screening for potential constituent startups to require some ethics consideration prior to joining the incubator. Although many companies have not thought about ethics before, they seem to be open to suggestions for further resources. We learned as a group that it can be very difficult to bring awareness to companies that have more pressing concerns on their plate, but if we make the problem evident to them and initiate resources for them, they usually will respond positively. Some other improvements we could add to future letters are perhaps more specific questions catered to the company that we are addressing, such as direct ethical problems that could arise for their particular product or industry. Our current letter is general and applies to any startup, since we were simply trying to collect as many opinions as possible.

Our ethics letter is only a stepping stone to possible future plans that could have an even bigger impact on bringing ethical awareness to startups. Depending on the type of feedback we receive, we’d like to provide a more interactive resource for engaging companies, current and future, in our ethics discussion. Perhaps we could provide a mandatory ethics worksheet for companies that would like to join Skydeck, and if we are successful, we could influence bigger companies as well. In terms of Skydeck itself, we could propose starting an ethics committee to screen potential companies and ensure that they have ethics on their horizon. Also, since Skydeck already has weekly presentations on various technologies, we could possibly encourage them to incorporate ethics into the conversation. Alternatively, we could replace one of these technological presentations per month with an ethics-themed presentation, maybe integrating elements from E125’s Ethics in the News assignments.

We feel it is important that tech companies are aware that they have an ethical duty in society for the products they create and the ideas they generate in the engineering and science community. The point of our project is simply to motivate companies to think about ethics. Without this letter, ethical concerns may not even be on the company’s radar, which we realized through our individual interviews. We hope that with our current and future efforts in bringing awareness to startups, we can have a positive impact on the ethical direction of these companies.

Rafi Lurie, Bill Cao, Amy Chiang, Cheyanne Galinato

Engineers are tasked with designing and building, from the smallest nanochips to the largest airplanes and ships. As a result, the way the world is built around us and the materials that make them up are almost completely reliant on the engineer’s design. A large amount of the world’s scare resources are being used up in the construction and building of all of the world’s products that are designed by engineers. We believe that we can design a three-pronged approach to educate engineers on the ethical concern of saving resources and using their power as designers to help to contribute to making a greener planet. We believe that engineers have the duty to improve the world, and doing that in a way that harms the environment is counterproductive. We have come up with a three step program consisting of office buy-in, educational seminars, hands on activity that will give engineers holistic exposure to these issues and hopefully make the environment a consideration when they are creating a product.

The first component of our three step program is to institute a comprehensive recycling program in an engineers office. This will show engineers that the environment is a priority for the company and that their company has “bought in” to being environmentally conscious. Employees craft their products in line with their company’s values, and by implementing a recycling program at work, the company will tangibly make the environment a company priority and explicitly show that to its employees. This could be done by putting MAXR bins around the office, which is a four bin set for landfill, mixed paper, cans and bottles, and compost. Each bin also has pictures of what goes in each bin. In this way, the company will dispose of its waste in a more responsible manner, and because engineers will participate in this program, they will start to consider the environment more, as they will be active participants in helping to preserve it.

The second component of the program will be instituting quarterly environment education seminars for all employees, including engineers. These seminars will show the employees the impact that the company is having on the environment including a project by project breakdown and will also show how many resources the company is saving with its waste management program. For example, companies could show their electricity, paper, water, or product materials usage statistics over time. Additionally, the seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of a different big environmental issue every seminar. These seminars will consistently help keep engineers updated about the state of the world and keep them conscious about the world around them.

The third component of the program will be a semi annual hands on service project that employees at the office will have to participate it. This can be done as a group or alone, but will need to consist of two hours of doing a project like helping to plant a garden or cleaning the beach. The project will get employees into the world and help them see the problems first hand. Once they experience it, engineers will feel that they have a personal attachment to the environmental problems and are more likely to buy-in after having personally contributed work to help the problems.

This comprehensive program addressing engineers in the daily work environment, in an educational way, and in an active way will allows them to get a holistic understanding of environmental issues and will hopefully get them thinking about ways that they can consider the environment when designing products in their work. At first, we will pioneer this program at a small company as a first run. Once the kinks have been ironed out and we are satisfied, we will begin to roll out this program to companies who are interested in the helping the environment as part of company culture and then, hopefully, to a wide range of companies. Companies will have the option of implementing one, two, or all three modules so that we can customize the experience to each companies respective needs.

Group 4 proposed a change in the class evaluation questions that are filled out by students at the end of the semester. They explained that the motivation behind this is that the questions students are given only assess the teaching effectiveness of the instructor, and therefore not actually addressing ethical issues in the classroom. The new questions proposed would ask the students more about their ethical concerns with the course material. For example, if a class was being taught about technology to develop autonomous robots, the new questions would try to get the engineers thinking about the ethical concerns with the technology, and evaluate the class from an ethical standpoint.

As a result of their clear proposal, our group decided to give Group 4 an A- or B+. The presentation was clear, creative in the fact that it addresses ethics during the course surveys, which are mandatory. The proposal is possible to implement, and concrete, given their outline for plans to submit a proposal to ABET. The place where this strategy may be lacking is in its effectiveness; students may just skip over the ethics questions and not engage with the evaluation thoroughly.

Group 6 has, based on its multiple interviews with industry professionals and engagement with students during Engineering Ethics Week, identified some shortfalls of addressing engineering ethics for students here at UC Berkeley. After some brainstorming of methods to address these shortfalls, they settled on creating a “summary” video of community members addressing common ethics themes for everyone else to view. We feel that this is a great and extremely feasible way to introduce people who may not have given much thought to ethics beforehand to the actual state of affairs that everyone else is involved in. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, this video would be great for highlighting the difference of opinions and views that one person of a particular background may have failed to consider when shaping his opinion on a certain topic. By holding interviews with individuals of various backgrounds and summarizing results in not only an informative, but also fun, video to watch, everyone who comes across the video stands to gain some information that they previously neglected to consider or not known about. However, we must stress that the video must cover a broad background of people in order to be full effective and avoid the bias that single person is likely to exhibit (that would partially degrade the “awareness” goal of the video). This is a point that needs to be considered when creating the video. Also, we would like to see that the group has a follow-up plan for this video. We believe this video is a good start, but they can use the end of this video to propose a blog (as one of their original brainstormed ideas) or another group’s project efforts in order to keep the discussion going, and so that a viewer’s interest and engagement doesn’t end with the end of the video.

Jason Liu

Paolo Fonseca

Shawn Nirody

Timothy Brown

           Your proposal is very similar to ours in that it also involves the distribution of handouts meant to increase ethical awareness by getting students interested in ethics and promoting discussion. Though it seems we have slightly different methods of doing so, both of which are perfectly valid and effective. Our handout is almost entirely made up of scenarios and open-ended questions while yours includes both basic information on ethics and a survey. I gather that the purpose of this survey is two-fold. While it provides very useful data, it also encourages students to question their personal opinions and judgments, which I think is an important first step toward developing more mature ethical views. Personally, I think your results are very interesting, especially when you found that for engineering students, their levels of understanding of ethics was uninfluenced by their major, but progressed positively with age / academic maturity.

        As a group, we think that this proposal is an extremely effective method of spreading ethical awareness among the student body. Additionally, it was a very good idea for your group to have given the results to the College of Engineering. Although you did not mention what you hoped to accomplish by providing them with your data, we assume that the data would be put to good use.

We can offer only a few criticisms about the survey. You say that your sample population for the survey was exclusively engineering students. Perhaps it would have been better to have used a more diverse sampling to represent students from other majors or in other departments. Their participation might have provided interesting results in terms of how other majors view the role of ethics in fields other than their own, such as engineering and technology or the life sciences. Also you included a question in your survey that let students rate their own understanding of engineering ethics on a scale of 1 through 5. As our instructor had pointed out, this seems rather difficult to quantify.

 One of our favorite parts of your handout was the common rationalizations. We think that this is a great way to help people identify when an ethical issue may arise in their work. It also gives people some points to reflect on regarding their past actions. We can all look back at our lives and find one instance where we said one of these things whether in engineering or not. This is a great way to get the conversation on ethics started.

We thought that you also did a great job of leading the discussion after your presentation. Your prepared questions were on point and did a great job of sparking class discussion.

For more information on the proposal, their proposal can be found here

Overall the presentation went well. All the members did a great job on explaining their proposal. Their idea is a good step in solidifying the concreteness of the DIY Biology ethics blogs, which will help set concrete ethical guidelines for DIY Biologists. There is more that can be done to achieve the goal. On top of emailing the administrators of the blogs, creating a blog post about the suggested format for posting in the blog would raise more awareness for the blogs’ users about the problem of not have more concrete guidelines. Furthermore, it would be very beneficial to gain support from well-respected people in the Biology community who could also help set these ethical standards. Therefore emailing such people is another smart action to take.

Another potential step to take is contacting the DIY Biology websites that give the procedures for experiments. Raise more awareness about the ethics when approaching an experiment by suggesting to the administrators of these websites to set up links to ethics blogs. Especially for newcomers, the excitement of starting a DIY Biology experiment might overshadow the importance of the ethical guidelines to follow.

Group 1’s Project Proposal: Engineering C126/UGBA C126

To quickly summarize Group 1’s project, their idea was to propose an ethics class cross-listed between the engineering department and Haas. They brought up the good point that the College of Engineering is inconsistent in its ethics requirements for different majors, and therefore they suggest both making ethics courses a requirement throughout the entire college as well as creating an entirely new class devoted to teaching ethics across multiple disciplines.

Their idea is innovative and interesting – though proposing a new class is highly ambitious and difficult to implement at a large public school like Cal, their arguments were strong and they were very thorough in their written proposal. Their proposal letter was written reasonably, though they could have included more details and been more convincing. They included even a general future plan with goals, and went as far as to design a syllabus, clearly taking the best parts of E125 and incorporating them into this new course.

Some possible improvements might include having more concrete long-term goals and implementation plans in order to make this feat more possible, including some feedback regarding ethics courses that are currently available and arguing why this cross-listed version would be a beneficial addition, and garnering faculty and student support for this proposed class. Also, as mentioned earlier, the civic engagement portion of the project was significantly weaker than the first half of the written proposal. Their plan was fascinating and the syllabus was extremely creative and showed a great knowledge of ethics topics, but the letter fell slightly short. It was not as persuasive as it should have been to make their ideal course proposal an executable task, since it would likely take a very convincing letter and further proposals to convince the school to offer a completely new class when other ethics courses are available.

All in all, the proposal and presentation were very nuanced and unique, and we as a group enjoyed reading their plan and hearing what they had to say. We look forward to seeing their results!

Section 102 Group 3 – Review of group 4 (made a video asking people in Ethics Week about an issue that they felt was an ethical dilemma)

There are several issues with their video. Firstly, it comes off as a project that was done out of convenience, rather than to further an actual goal. This does not mean that the video project was necessarily a bad idea, but the presentation did not seem to fit with the video well.  Neither the groups presentation or the group’s video seemed to show any direction.  I think that videos are good mediums for awareness, however I would have liked to see this group focus in on one issue instead of staying as vague as they did.  Also, it seems like only one group member was involved with making the video.  I am interested to see what this group could accomplish if everyone has helped make the youtube clip.

Secondly, this project brings up a lot of questions, but never really analyzes any of them in depth, nor does it propose any solutions to the problems. There is a long gap between having people thinking that something is a problem, and having a conversation start regarding the solution. While it can be argued that such a project raises awareness for issues that are important in engineering, the converse can also be said: most of the issues raised are already fairly well-known, and bringing them up again does little to further progress on the issues. We think that they may have been better served by making a video that was more in-depth and did more analysis on one single issue, instead of trying to focus on every issue under the sun, or so it seemed.

Furthermore, we have doubts about the extent of “civic engagement” in this project. In the making of the video, they did indeed engage with the public, by asking passerby about their opinions, but the number of people reached in this manner would have been extremely limited in the larger scheme of things. They say that this video should be shown to other sections, or propagated on the internet to spread awareness, but this doesn’t seem all that plausible. The video is well-made, but doesn’t really take a new spin on things, and thus wouldn’t have any lasting impact that would spur users to proactively spread the video. This goes back to the last point regarding this project’s lack of in-depth engagement and dialogue. Also, there are already plenty of videos that discuss ethical issues in a much more effective manner; contributing to a less well-established field would have been much more effective.

However, there are some aspects of the project that we really liked. Namely, we liked how the video engaged with actual people from the public, making it a more accurate reflection of perception and sentiment among the population that really matters: the population as a whole. We also liked how there was a fairly diverse range of questions raised, but again would have preferred a few to be analyzed in a more in-depth fashion.

In summary, we think that this group had the potential for a better presentation.  However, we think that they have a good start and should improve their video idea by focusing their content and resolving and analyzing some of the questions that they generated.